Employee engagement: 10 best practices for improving your culture

Join in the quest for meaning

One of the biggest motivators for humans is meaning. When people are doing something that matters to them — and it is taking them in a direction they want to go — they are in the sweet spot of engagement. Not everyone finds meaning in the same way but you can build engagement by helping people look for it.

“Engagement happens when employees feel in sync with the organization, department, teammates, and work,” says Graeme Thompson, SVP and CIO of Informatica. “Does it contribute to something meaningful for them?”

Sometimes people will find meaning in the work itself. But when that isn’t happening, they can find it in the mission of the company, their own career goals, or in making customers happy.

“To keep team members engaged, they must feel a connection and value with their work,” agrees Geri Johnson, COO at Next PR. “As leaders, it is our job to ensure the roles we’re creating have meaning for both the company and the team member. Find out what people love and match those passions to their projects. Not only will this alignment between meaning and work drive productivity in your workforce, but team members will feel seen and that their skillsets are vital.”

Create heroes who live your values

“It’s simple to drive engagement with values and culture,” says Omer Glass, co-founder and CEO at Growthspace. “It’s hard to do. But it is simple.”

First define your values clearly. “Then make it clear what each value stands for, what behaviors are connected to it — and what is not,” he says. “This all needs to be very specific.”

Next, model those behaviors and build them into the fabric of the work. “You have to act upon them again, and again, and again,” he says. “So people know you’re not just talking but also doing.”

The best way to accomplish this is to make it part of a leader’s job. “This is the CEOs job,” he says.

Once your CEO — or whoever is tasked with championing your values — has agreed to carry this torch, they should work it into everything. “Embed it in the language,” says Glass. Use it in day-to-day communications. Work it into the theme and closing message of meetings. Talk about it on social media. Work it into conversations. You have to be an evangelist for these values.

And make it part of the way you recognize people. “Every time someone lives up to the value, praise them,” he says. “Create heroes who live your values.”

Measure engagement

“Measuring engagement is vitally important,” says Datasite’s LaMere. “That starts with an employee engagement survey.”

No matter how well you connect with your people, you still might come away with a wrong impression. Doing surveys gives you a realistic metric for how employees feel. “An employee engagement survey will give you the numbers and insights you need to drive effective decision-making,” according to Culture Amp. “By comparing your latest survey results with data from previous surveys, you can track changes in engagement over time.” A survey can also help you translate abstract concepts into actionable insights.

But engagement surveys need top-down support. Leaders need to glean knowledge from the survey and act on what they’ve learned. And don’t just read the AI summary or data readout, says Laura Merling, chief transformation and operations officer at Arvest Bank. “You have to actually read what people have written.”

This can feel like a big ask but it’s well worth it, she says. Merling’s team reads the feedback from every employee. “Then we aggregate it,” she says. “Each leader is responsible for reading their team’s feedback, aggregating it, and saying, ‘What do we need to address?’”

Frequently take the people’s pulse

Engagement surveys can take months from beginning to end and are usually annual. So it’s a good idea to check in more often than that, according to LaMere.

“Do a pulse check,” she says. “Getting a quick Net Promoter Score [NPS] is great for this.” This is a simple, one-question check: Would you recommend this company to family and friends?  

“If an employee is willing to recommend the company, that’s a big thing,” she says. “If they’re not willing, we’ve got a problem.”

This check lets you stay connected to the mood of the people, so you don’t get big surprises from the annual survey. It also lets you know when you need to do more to build engagement day-to-day.

“The survey is important,” agrees Merling. “Not just at the very beginning, but ongoing to see where the process is, or where the gaps are in what you’re doing.”

Have fun together

As the world moved to hybrid or remote work environments, it became easy to lose the human connection that once happened in a shared setting. The Gallup poll found, though, that location is not the problem. Engagement can happen in a remote or hybrid environment if leaders are intentional about it.

If there is no real reason to go to the same place for work, do it to have fun. “Fun is a core value for us,” says LaMere. “We work hard and we play hard.”

The company organizes everything from pickleball tournaments to puppy cuddling parties. “When you get to know your employees — not just through work and projects, where you’re laughing or cuddling with puppies, it changes the world, in terms of how you interact with one another,” she says. “You get to know everybody on a real level.”

This can be done virtually, too. Canahuati’s teams at 1Password get together to do virtual hackathons that bring a sense of play into the workplace. “We give people the room once a quarter or so to work on something completely unrelated to work,” he says. “And we try to take a playful approach. We’ll give people swag, send them stickers, create hype videos. It gets people excited and helps everyone get to know each other and have fun.”

Facilitate growth

In the Gallup State of the Global Workplace survey, 41% of respondents said they wanted clearer goals and stronger guidance. Leaders must keep the growth path of their people in mind and help them get where they want to go.

“I focus on people’s individual development and growth,” says Canahuati. “I can be a connection point between someone — who may have talked about wanting to work on machine learning or AI — but isn’t getting that opportunity. I’ll talk to the leader of the group doing that and say, ‘Here is a person you should reach out to.’”

Like recognition, this can go wrong if you aren’t paying attention to what people want, though. “I’ve had experiences where I pointed somebody in a direction, only to find out later that it wasn’t interesting to them,” he says.

LaMere says this is why it’s important to coach people to become advocates for their own growth. “It’s important to equip the manager to have conversations about growth,” she says. “But managers are not mind readers. So, it’s also key to coach employees on how to have a conversation with their manager about their career.”

Help people navigate change

“When the world changes, and people don’t understand it, they react poorly,” says Canahuati. “Change is hard for everybody.”

Change is necessary, though. You update tools and security protocols, react to markets, respond to global crisis, and more. “When people can’t connect to why the change is necessary, engagement goes down,” he says.

So, he is careful to help people understand the reasons behind change. “I help them connect — from an emotional perspective — to what they’re doing, how they operate on a day-to-day basis, and how their projects will help the company succeed.”

Change is Merling’s job. “We are doing a transformation,” she says of her work at Arvest Bank. “We want to bring everybody along for the ride.” People might assume, though, that if they don’t have the skills that the transformation needs, they will lose their job. This is scary. So part of her transformation includes offering assistance and time at work for people to upskill and reskill.

In the year after this message went out, employee engagement jumped 21 points and there were some amazing outcomes. “One gentleman on our bank operations team — not a technology role — had an interest in learning to code.” The company gave him a green light, time, tools, and support. “He is becoming a cloud architect,” she says.

To showcase these positive changes, the company does a monthly “Transformation Talk.” It is a virtual event where people talk about their transformations. “About 500 people a month show up to this webinar,” she says. “It’s amazing.”

Listening to what people want and helping them get there has not only transformed the bank and careers, but it has also transformed employee engagement.

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